Museums are being urged by Government to raise money from all possible sources to cope with the cuts that are being made in public funding. But how realistic is it that public funding can be replaced by money from elsewhere? Read more…

I have been working this week on a Report for the Mayor of Liverpool, Cllr Joe Anderson, on the city’s cultural heritage – the nature of it, the challenges, how to care for what we have, how to attract visitors to Liverpool, funding for the heritage itself etc etc. If the Report is any good, it will become a model in which other cities around the world will be very interested: the care and ‘use’ of our cultural heritage is a global issue, and the heritage sector has not been especially intelligent in explaining the whys and wherefores to sceptics, many of whom have a simple belief that looking after our cultural heritage is a luxury we cannot afford. Read more…

Simon Calder, the travel writer and broadcaster, interviewed me for The One Show last week because of the growing public interest in the impact cuts in government funding are having on museums, an interest that reached something of a peak when the London-based Science Museum announced that it might have to close one of its northern ‘branches’ in Manchester, Bradford and York if its budgets were cut further.

Simon had a suggestion about admission charges. He agrees that admission charges for British taxpayers would lead to a drop in the number of people who visit museums, which cannot be a good thing, so he wasn’t advocating that. And we can’t charge EU citizens if we don’t charge British citizens, according to EU law. His proposal is that that we should charge non-EU citizens only. Read more…

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